RubyEncoder News

Case Study: Boecore

It was recently reported that RubyEncoder has been used in an exciting project with the US Department of Defence. Engineering and IT services company, Boecore, based in Colorado Springs, CO, has been using Ruby Encoder for one of the first Ruby on Rails projects for the DoD. 

The project, entitled BoBCAT, is deployed on an internal classified network for Information Assurance (IA) work. While the classified network protects against external threats, most thefts occur from within, and this is where Ruby Encoder has proven indispensable. With RubyEncoder in place, it is not possible for someone to access the server and change the code to transmit classified information; therefore this removed the vulnerability in scripted applications.  

Boecore has also taken into account protection of its own intellectual property (IP) on this project. With BoBCAT being deployed on a server over which Boecore has no direct access or control, it is important that they protect their IP, which is done by encrypting their code with RubyEncoder once the Government has approved it. 

In short, Ruby Encoder gives Boecore’s BoBCAT application a level of security against malicious source code changes as well as intellectual property protection that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

Boecore is an engineering and information technology services company, headquartered in Colorado Springs, CO. Since 2000 Boecore has grown to have a workforce totalling over 100 employees who support a variety of Defence and Commercial customers in several core technical disciplines.

For more about Boecore visit www.boecore.com, or call (888)-540-5635

This release includes update of the encoder and loaders. In this release:

• Encoder: added Windows Vista support
• Encoder: fixed the problem with encoded files detection containing a shell prefix #!
• Loaders: added support for Ruby 1.9.1
• Loaders: other minor fixes

The update of the encoder is recommended to users running Windows Vista. The update of loaders is recommended to users running Ruby 1.9.1.

Alex

We have updated RubyEncoder loaders and the new version is available for download. The fix includes better support for Ruby-Enterprise edition.  If you do not use Ruby-Enterprise this update is not required.

Updated loaders are available from our site http://rubyencoder.com/loaders.html

We have released an update for RubyEncoder Loaders. This version of loaders includes the following fixes:

• Fixed random segfault errors in loaders caused by the ruby garbage collector
• Fixed problems running protected rails configuration scripts (see below)
• Added support for Ruby-enterprise 1.8.6

Note: It is possible to encode and deploy rails configuration files usually stored in /config folder. You cannot encode *.yml database configuration script as it's not a ruby script. We suggest to use a cipher to encrypt this and load and decrypt it from the RubyEncoder protected code. So you will keep the key safe within the RubyProtected script.

Also you cannot have encoded /config/environments/*.rb scripts. Leave them unencoded. The reason for it is Rails internals. Rails loads the environment file dynamically and evaluates it with eval(). This will not work for protected scripts.

Updated loaders are available from our site http://rubyencoder.com/loaders.html